Note: This is a rebuttal to Inga Saffron's lackluster review of this building. With pictures, no less.Of all of Erdy-McHenry's buildings, the new Drexel University 34th Street Dormitory just might be their most impressive. Where the firm has seemed to specialize in building commie block slabs at times in the past (witness Penn's Radian and Temple's Edge) with the Drexel Dorm we get something completely different: a gently twisting, undulating structure on a narrow footprint overlooking fantastic views of Center City and Fairmount Park. Only one other E-M design exhibits the complete package as well as this dorm: Hancock Square--but even there, its low-slung
power is its defining characteristic, its clear influence of all it sees: Onion Flats Row along Laurel, and developments along Liberties Walk and by Liberty Lands Park. No: here E-M had to do something it's never done (to my knowledge) before: fit a building into a small footprint in a densely-developed area. The Edge and Avenue North complex had a full block to play with, and the Radian possibly more; Hancock Square is the bottom third of what was once an industrial superblock; E-M simply does not think small.
They didn't think small here, that's for sure. What Drexel wanted was a dorm; what they got was clearly a showpiece and a monument, a building shaming its built Big 5 rivals. At Temple, 1300 is still considered incoming freshman students' dorm of choice, despite the Edge clearly eclipsing it in terms of age; I'm not too sure about the Penn situation, but somehow I would doubt the Radian is
choice. But this 34th Street Dorm
is. There is no denying that it is the most stunning piece of architecture raised in this city since the Thin Flats, or quite possibly even Hancock Square itself. In this I agree with Inga, but then our views begin to diverge...
Inga says that:
That's very nice for the people on the inside, but there are serious problems with the building at the ground level -- more serious than any of Erdy McHenry's previous projects. While the architects argue that a slender tower is less intrusive than a bulky structure that filled the site, they never found a way to mediate the high-rise's abrupt change in scale from the largely Victorian neighborhood.
And while, yes, there is a neighborhood of Victorian rows heading to the west--Frat Row, in fact--this is
not the context of the Drexel dorm. Actually, this building's context is not to be found to the west at all but rather to the south, namely, to Kelly Hall, which by being equally as out of ‘scale from the largely Victorian neighborhood’--about two-thirds as high as Millennium Hall, as apparently it's called, creates two things:
precedent and
context.
What do I mean by this? Well, consider Rittenhouse Square. 1706 Ritt, in fact. On three sides 1706's neighbors are low-rise structures, along Rittenhouse Square (street) stand townhouses, mansions from the glory old Gilded Age days; to the south rowhomes belonging properly to the South Street neighborhood; to the west a low-rise society structure of some sort. Following Inga's logic, shouldn't 1706 Ritt be embracing the southern, low-rise neighborhood? But it doesn't: instead, 1706 Ritt is contextualized by the Medical Building across the street, and by the other high-rises surrounding Rittenhouse Square proper. The Medical Building, by being the first there, created the
precedent allowing 1706 to go so high; the neighborhood 1706 looks to creates the
context.
Millennium Hall is no different. Kelly Hall set the
precedent; the rest of the Drexel campus, as studded with high-rises as Penn and Temple, creates the
context. It's not Frat Row that Millennium Hall needs to refer to at all (and what a joke it would be if it were!); rather, it's the campus grounds. She sees the building as looking westward where it primarily looks to the east and southeast. And as 1706 Ritt shows us this whole paragraph is naught but hot air.
Then you have this:
One rationale for elevating the tower on pilotis was to soften its landing and open a path into Drexel's evolving greenway. But the concessions are undermined by the tower's one-story companion, which houses an apartment for the dorm's adviser and mechanical systems. All three sides are blank walls, including the one facing the greenway. The south-facing wall is worse: With its corrugated metal and a visible cooling tower, it looks like the back end of a refrigerated warehouse.
Can somebody please explain to her what a
blank wall is? Or why mechanical systems are important? While there is
some truth to her criticism of the east side--which is where the main entrance is--I will argue that neither the north nor the west nor the the south sides are what she makes them out to be.
A blank wall means that there is nothing to look at. No windows to draw the eye in, no murals or sculpturing to provide a diversion. Yet when we look at Millennium Hall's north and west sides, what do we find? The west side has a glass wall letting us see into the rec room--and so no blank wall--and when I walk under the pilotis on the north side (disregarding the wind-tunnel effect), I find them nothing short of awe-inspiring, sculptural. I would hardly call that a blank wall.
The last--the south side--is at once the most insidious and inane criticism; buildings of this size need their mechanical outhouses to regulate things such as temperature and electricity, and to house the offices of essential personnel, i.e. the superintendent or RAs' boss. Where to put it?
Surely you don't want it mucking up the top, especially after you got the whole thing to sinewy twist like a muscle throwing a hammer? Shouldn't you then put it by the
other dorm building not twenty feet away? ...What do you think Erdy-McHenry did?
Nobody's going to notice, or care, about the south façade for the rather simple reason that hardly anybody's going to see it in the first place: it's positioned across from the maintenance strip for Kelly Hall! All we're going to see is a few scraps of corrugation at a distance, and as the designers at Budd knew well, corrugation adds its own sort of interest. Why would we want to look down that service alley at the dumpsters unless we really need to?
In fact, Millennium Hall responds excellently to its site: it supplies a view in and out towards 34th St.; its pilotis create a marvelous gigantic architectural sculpture on the north side; its maintenance wing on the south side abuts Kelly's on the north side. The only change I would make would be that the main entrance (on the east side) seems somewhat too sparse, too minimalist.
Inga's final issue, though, is spot-on: the emergency stairs' insulation board really shouldn't be there. They block the view--for what? Surely you can create sun-drenched emergency stairs people actually
want to take in a building with as many windows as this one? And yet, that that's my biggest concern with this building says something wholly positive on how well, all in all, it was executed. Millenium Hall stands tall, no matter where you are looking at it.
.
Source: http://archrecord.construction.com/yb/ar/article.aspx?story_id=135714594.
